Where She Has Gone (20 page)

“Marta,
chi è?
”

But Marta ignored her. She poured a single cup of espresso and set it in front of me.

“You’ll have to put your own sugar in it. I don’t know how much you want.”

The old woman stared out a minute more, then finally turned slowly back to the television. I could only assume she
was my Aunt Lucia: it seemed impossible that she was still alive, she who had always struck me as hopelessly ancient even when I was a child. Yet there she sat unchanged, as if the past twenty years had been merely the twinkling of an eye. I wasn’t sure how to acknowledge her, if she was lucid enough to realize who I was or was touched with the same half-madness as her daughter.

Marta was still standing at the counter.

“I suppose you’ll want to see the house,” she said. “I kept it up for you, like your grandfather wanted.”

This was the first sign she’d given that she’d in fact understood who I was. With that established, the tone that I had taken for hostility began to seem a kind of timidness, like a child’s sullen evasion of some not-quite-familiar relation.

“Yes, I’d like to,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”

But she had already taken a keyring down from a nail in the door frame and stood waiting for me while I finished my coffee. It seemed wrong not to greet Aunt Lucia in some way before leaving the house; but the instant I had set down my cup Marta was out the door. I followed her. She moved swiftly, one hand guiding her bad leg over the street’s cobblestoned unevenness. At the door of my grandfather’s house, with the air of a ritual she had repeated many times, she turned a small key from her keyring in the padlock to remove it and then a larger one in the door itself to click back a deadbolt.

We stepped inside. Marta flicked on a light. I had expected dust and decay, but the room we looked on stood in pristine order. There was a scarred wooden table in the middle of the room, a counter against the back wall with some rough cupboards and a rust-stained porcelain sink, a fireplace to one side
with a plain stone mantel above. Everything was as I remembered it and not, was familiar in some wordless, visceral way and yet utterly foreign and shrunken, too tangible somehow to be real. This was what it came down to, my past here, this barren room, these desolate objects, like a museum’s depiction of how things might have been.

“The water’s off,” Marta said. “There’s a tap to turn it on in the stable but I’ll have to do it, you won’t find it.”

“Oh.”

There were details I couldn’t account for, a marble floor that I remembered as concrete, a side balcony overlooking the valley, the simple dimensions of things, their small unprepossessingness. And something else: I couldn’t put my finger on it at first but then it came to me – the light. There had been no electricity in the village when I’d left it, that was how I remembered things – I could call up a dozen memories that depended on the fact, that made no sense without it. Perhaps the lights had been put in after we’d gone. Yet the fixtures in the room, the worn switch by the door, the frayed wire the light bulb dangled from, looked as if they’d been there forever.

“I didn’t think there’d be electricity,” I said.

Marta shot me a guarded look.

“Electricity?”

“The lights, I mean. I thought no one had lived here since we left.”

“That’s right.”

“Ah.”

She led me through the rest of the house, opening doors into empty rooms. There was my grandfather’s room on the
ground floor, and then upstairs my mother’s and my own. I kept expecting some surge of memory to take me over but felt only the same disjunction, the sense that my memory was being not so much stirred as stripped away, couldn’t bear being confronted like this with things as they were.

There was not a speck of dust on the ledges or floors, not a single cobweb on the ceilings. It was eerie, this pristine abandonment – it made me think of pictures I’d seen of Pompeii, of whole rooms, houses, streets held forever frozen at the moment of catastrophe.

“It’s very clean,” I said.

Marta grunted.

“I didn’t do any painting. You’ll have to do that yourself if you want.”

It was growing clear that she had kept the place up ever since it had been left empty, no doubt in some sort of perverse fidelity to the wishes of my grandfather, who had promised me at the time of my departure, though I was only a child then, that the house would be waiting for me should I ever return. It had been to Marta that my grandfather’s care had been entrusted when my mother and I had gone: he had still been bedridden then from a fall, and perhaps had remained so, for all I knew, until the end of his life. At the time, there had seemed a sort of gloating in Marta at this victory over my mother, at having wrested from her her father’s care.

When we had come back to the front door, Marta handed me a latchkey.

“You’ll have to decide what you want,” she said. “You can bring a bed over or you can stay up at our place, it’s the same to me.”

It seemed she was prepared simply to abandon me here, had fulfilled her obligations and was ready now to wash her hands of me.

“Well. I’m not sure. If there’s room at your place. For tonight, at least.”

“Suit yourself.”

And she started back up the street toward her house in her grim, purposeful way as though she’d just dispensed with some long-put-off errand.

I was left alone. The place seemed infected by Marta’s strangeness, by this weird sense of mission with which she’d maintained it. I wondered what it had taken to keep the house from crumbling as so many others had. Perhaps it had been simple force of will, as if it was only the realization that there was no one who cared any more whether they stood or fell that made houses crumble at all.

I stepped outside and followed the crooked stone steps that led down to the back of the house, where the stable opened out beneath the main floor. Someone, no doubt Marta, had kept up the back garden: there were neat rows of tomatoes and lettuce and fava beans, shored up between furrows cut deep into the earth to control the water flow along the slope. A little terrace of broken stone connected the side steps to the stable door, which was weathered and old but still intact. I pushed it open. Here, too, there was a light switch. I tried it and a bulb came on from an ancient outlet attached to a ceiling rafter.

The room had the look of a grotto or cave, the walls spongy with moisture and sediment, the floor of plain, beaten earth. There was no light except from the dim light bulb, no
ventilation except through the cracks in the door. If anything had happened here, back when the place had been rife with the smell of animals and shit, it would have had to have been some crude, unromantic thing, dirty and quick. Apart from a few farm implements in a corner now, a hoe, a spade, a watering can, the space was empty – it looked as if someone had scoured it, cleaned it down to bare earth and stone, then left it to moulder.

I sat down on a stump that someone had placed outside the stable door. The sun was shining, in that way it had, that I remembered, with a dry, dreamy mountain heat. It would be possible, in this heat, to forget things, to walk out to some sunny corner of pasture, and fall asleep. The landscape itself, stretching lazily down to the valley, was busy forgetting: where I remembered an unbroken sweep of carefully tended fields the wild had begun to take over, great patches of gorse and tangled undergrowth hemming in the occasional still-tidy holdout of vineyard or vegetable plot. It was as if this place itself, the land with its wilderness, the village with its ruined houses, had grown senile and old, was gradually nodding toward some eternal sleep.

I felt eyes on me suddenly and looked up to the back of a neighbouring house to see a young woman standing on a balcony there, staring toward me. She kept her gaze on me though I had seen her, in a curious, questioning way as if my being here in her familiar view, her familiar world, meant I could pose no threat.

I nodded in greeting, awkwardly.

“
Buongiorno
,” I said.

She was dressed in a loose summer dress, legs bare but her
feet in heavy-soled work shoes that looked bumpkinish against her bare legs.

“You’re the grandson of
lu podestà
,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if she’d simply hazarded a guess or if the word had already somehow got around.

“
Sì
.”

“
Bentornato
.”

She was very pretty, I saw now. Her hair, wavy and dark and long, caught glints of red from the sun.

“You used to play with my older brothers and sisters,” she said. “They’ve all moved away now.”

“Ah.”

“
Mi chiamo
Luisa.”

“Vittorio.
Mi chiamo
Vittorio.”

“Yes. Maybe you’ll come by sometime for a coffee.”

“
Sì
.”

She smiled. This was the first normal conversation I’d had since I’d arrived here, the first sign of welcome.

“I’ll see you soon then.”

And she turned and went in.

I had supper at Marta’s. Somehow I had ended up simply turning myself over to her brusque ministrations: after a long walk in the countryside surrounding the village I’d found myself making my way back to her house with the tired, lonely sense that there was sanctuary there, that I’d be safe. The instant supper was set out, Aunt Lucia got up from her place in front of the television and made her way to the table, infinitely slow but with no other apparent sign of infirmity.

At the table she looked me over as if trying to place me.

“Is this the one?” she said. “But this is the boy from before, the mailman’s friend. Tell him to come closer.”

I brought my chair around next to hers and took one of her hands. It had the veined translucence I remembered from childhood, glossy and smooth like a water-smoothed stone.

“It’s Vittorio,” I said. “Your nephew. You used to give me five-
lire
coins.”

And she looked me up and down and nodded her approval before finally turning to her food.

Against one wall of the kitchen was an old curio cabinet with some framed photographs inside. There was one of my grandfather, in his reservist’s uniform, his war medals neatly lined up along his breast pocket; there was one of Aunt Lucia and a man I took to be her husband, though I’d never known him. Tucked away in a corner was one of a young woman and child standing sombrely before the doorway of a house. The woman, it seemed, was pregnant.

“It was the day you left,” Marta said, seeing where my eye had gone.

The woman had a plain, peasant look, her hair long and dark and limp, her dress hanging formlessly over her belly. She was holding the hand of the boy beside her.

“I don’t remember this,” I said.

“If you remember it or you don’t, there it is.”

The doorway we were standing before was Aunt Lucia’s. I recognized the keystone, the plastic strips. But everything that might have made sense of the picture had been cut out of it, whatever was going on at its periphery, whoever this woman was that Marta seemed to claim was my mother. I could hardly fathom this image of her: it was not just her plainness
that struck me, how far she fell from the ideal of her I had created, but that she stood so vulnerable, so grave, with such a look of the mountain peasant that I could hardly imagine I’d ever known her.

“You can have it if you want,” Marta said finally. “It was only you we kept it for.”

And in my room that night I hid it away in one of my suitcases as if it were a piece of evidence to be concealed.

The room Marta had given me was one that my mother and I had shared for a few nights before our departure, after our own house had been closed up. I remembered the crucifix over the bed, the old wooden armoire, the double doors to the balcony. It had been Marta’s room then, and possibly still was now, though there was little to show that it had ever been occupied again after our departure, none of the usual trinkets or adornments of human habitation. Even the bedspread looked unchanged, fusty and heavy and old, with silky embroidering in faded crimsons and reds. My mother had been well into her pregnancy at the time: I remembered the warm bulk of her, the drag of her belly against the sheets. It was odd to think that Rita had existed then, that she had been floating there in my mother’s womb just an enigma, a possibility, knowing nothing of what she was or would become.

In the morning, when I awoke, I heard muted voices from the kitchen. There was a small, kerchiefed woman at the kitchen table when I went down, another much larger one at
the door. From the hush that fell over the room when I entered it I had the sense that the women had been expecting me.

“So who might this stranger be?” the one at the door said, with a sort of timid heartiness. I knew the voice, knew these women but couldn’t pull their images up out of my memory.

Marta was making coffee.

“You can see for yourself,” she said.

The woman gave me a look to show she was stringing Marta along.

“See what? All I see is a handsome stranger.”

“He came back for the house,” Marta said. “Like I said he would.”

Another look.

“And which house is that?”

Marta was growing impatient.

“Don’t be an idiot. How many houses are there? If it’s not this one, then it’s the other.”

“You don’t mean the old mayor’s house?”

There was an air of intrigue in the room that had begun to seem familiar: I could picture these women, or ones like them, in my mother’s kitchen when I was a child, passing innuendos and hints in this same probing, joking way, trying to get to the bottom of things.

“
Dai
, Maria, leave her be,” the woman at the table said now. “Anyway, I knew it the minute I saw him, you can tell by the eyes. Come,
giovanotto
, you must remember Maria and me. Giuseppina. We used to come by your house sometimes.”

“What does he remember, he was only a child,” Maria said.

“It’s true. How many years ago was it now?”

Maria had finally moved into the room to take a seat.

“It was exactly five years before his grandfather died, I remember that,” she said. “It was sad how that happened. He went a little crazy in the end.”